October 20, 2019

Nuclear Ooze

I finished the first draft of my gloghack, Nuclear Ooze! Finished is a strong word, I guess. I looked through it again after I published the pdf, and noticed a bunch of wonking formatting, weird choices, and wording issues that I can't be bothered to go back through right now. Next time, I'll fix it.

It's primarily frankensteined together from Arnold K's original rules, Skerple's Rat on a Stick, Meandering Banter's Die Trying, and Cratered Land's Mimics and Miscreants, although there are a lot of influences (read: things I've mercilessly stolen and ripped from other games).

>>Get Nuclear Ooze Here<<

Tell me what you think, especially if you use it!

Here's a bonus race, because I haven't posted any actual gameplay related stuff in a while.


Dunkleostans
Bipedal jungle fish-people. Long, single-finned tails and stubby legs like newt's limbs. The tail is thick with corded muscle, wide as two human thighs. Their heads are large and covered in thick plates of bone; two beady eyes stare out pugnaciously above a wide mouth lined with two razor-sharp ridges of bone, able to shear straight through a spear's haft.

They are unwieldy on land; they propel themselves through the water with powerful motions of that huge tail and catch prey like riversquid and the bastard dolphins that move in the silty water. A bonefish kraal is made of padded, clay-thick mud, woven with water reeds and bamboo beneath the surface. They sleep in the mud, gills gently moving and bubbling through the surface.

Despite their fearsome appearance, they are quite friendly with traders and other denizens of the Hundred Rivers Valley. They usually choose to remain in conclaves with other bonefish families, although a few of their number go to Larothe or any of the other Lake Cities to make a life in the newly-burgeoning modern, industrialized world.

Perk: Your head always is considered armored. +1 AC or AP or whatever system you use, ignore most head wounds.
Downside: You must return to the water (or at least a wet bank of mud) to sleep every night, or you'll start to suffocate.
Stat Reroll: Strength


October 13, 2019

The Prismatic Studio

About a month ago, Lexi of A Blasted, Cratered Land and I collaborated on a project to make an art-wizard and corresponding dungeon. We talked back and forth, brainstorming for a week at most before Lexi told me she was almost done writing her wizard. I hadn't started the dungeon yet. Some feverish, sleepless nights later I had finished this, The Prismatic Studio, a painted world of corrupted art and surreal architecture plagued by posers and encroaching muses.

I'm pretty satisfied with the actual writing (although I think the power of null paint should be more clear to players, after some playtesting), but not so much with the layout and design (google docs fucking blows for layout, especially the columns). I'm slowly making a full art, better laid out zine-style version that I might put up for sale if the stars align, but for now, here's the free pdf for you to run some pretentious dadaist mercenaries through.

Pairs well with animal collective.

>IT'S DEEP, YOU JUST DON'T GET IT<

Dungeon Room Generator

Another generator courtesy of paperelemental! This one is for generating individual dungeon rooms.


October 12, 2019

NPC Generator

Just a quick post combining my personal NPC generator with paperelemental's HTML creator.


October 5, 2019

MECH RULES

How I felt when I realized it was Saturday and I hadn't started writing this yet

The glog community challenge is ending soon, and I haven’t written lore yet, but here are the rules to steal and do with what you want. Inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion, which in my humble opinion is one rad fucking show.

SIZE: 1-10
1 is barely taller than a human, 5 is an office building, 10 is a city.

HP: SIZE*100

HULL: Number from 0-5.
When you get hit, roll a d6 under your Hull to negate the damage (it’s just cosmetic damage, scratched paint and dents and showers of sparks).
If you get hit with max damage or a crit, reduce your Hull by 1.

MECH DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT: When you are reduced to half your HP or below, roll below. At a quarter HP, roll again. The wound becomes severe (aka limbs ripped off, massive damage, weapons destroyed). At 0 the mech is destroyed.

1-2. Torso or head damaged.
3-4. Limb damaged.
5. Weapons system disabled for 1d4 rounds.
6. Internal systems damaged. Roll damage again.

ATTACK: +2 to the pilot’s base attack stats.
The basic mech attack (fisticuffs) deals damage in the form of (SIZE)d10. A small mech might do 1d10 damage per hit, while an Eva or Jager will do 5d10 per hit.

SPEED: 3d6, -1 for any more legs than 2.
Like basic player speed, but on a grander scale.

STABILITY: 20-SPEED
Roll under Stability when something tries to knock you over.

Any other checks use the pilot’s base stats, just scaled up to mech-size.

Small enemies (individual humans) deal 1 damage to you, negated by Hull unless they critically hit.

To pilot a war-machine, your blood chemistry must be altered, usually through injections of a specialized drug matrix called an interface cocktail. It makes you rage as a barbarian as the machine’s alien fury floods your mind. 2-in-6 to stop your homicidal rampage and exit the machine, with a +1 to the chance for every level you have.

War-machines bond to their operators, not (usually) allowing others to pilot them. There’s a 1-in-20 chance the machine will allow someone else to drive them.

Horrible weapons and technology incoming in another post.

September 29, 2019

Eldritch GLOG, Or: A Distraction From Actual Shit I Should Be Writing

I made a quick GLOG-ish hack. Probably should be working on my actual hack, Nuclear Ooze, but one of my players wanted to play Call of Cthulhu and was shocked by how much ungodly bloat there was. (Also I object to Lovecraft on grounds of how much of a racist bastard he was). So I made this, Nidus, or the Eldritch Guide to Gaming (EGG). It's pretty unpolished and unplaytestes, but it's free and seems like it'll run.

It's cobbled together from the corpses of GLOG, ItO, and CoC, so you should check those games out if you like any of this one. Also, I stole the madness section pretty much wholesale from Spwack's system so check his stuff out, it's all really good.


Also, about mental illnesses: These are not meant to be jokes or taken lightly out of context of the game. Plenty of people in my life (including me) are affected by mental illness, so I'm not trying to belittle them or their struggles. But this is a game about insanity-inducing monsters. If you have any suggestions about how they've been handled or how to handle them better, please let me know.

If you have any suggestions or problems with any of it, let me know, actually.

September 28, 2019

Lunar Vampires

The Moon is dead, but there is life on and in it. Deep under the surface where the polyp-trees stretch their paralyzed branches and release reified madness in mercury drops to the sky, beneath the caverns and hollows made when the ground shifted and made room for lunar slugs and beetle-bears, there are deposits of a strange, hard material like ceramic but somehow more pliable. This is where the dead lie, the terrible secrets of eons past that have been buried under ash and layers of strange decay.

The deposits, if you were to exhume them (and exhuming them is what it would be, for you would be digging up tombs and coffins), would be ovoid, like squashed spheres of white plastic. Sometimes they'd have crushed and bent articulated legs. There are doorways and openings. They are huge, a few more than a mile across. You'd see the tracks they dig through the strata as they so slowly gravitate towards each others, at a geological pace. They grow into each other like mitosis in reverse. Inside, they are dark, deactivated, fractal, and incomprehensible. They each served myriad purposes, once.

This is the main arena of dungeon-delving on the Moon. Or at least the most ripe for plunder; a latticeman doesn't have much to offer adventurers than a pile of slimy spacesuits and some rotted bones. But the vampire catacombs are jam-packed: filled with strange equipment, surgical labs, esoteric weapons, and of course, vampires.

Lunar vampires aren't stereotypical eastern European counts. In fact, they look like slightly-shriveled, dead versions of your friends. Sometimes literally. There's a 25% chance that one of the vampires you fight or interact with is a doppelganger of someone you know. There's a 1% chance it looks like you. They actually come from a different version or timeline of the Moon and Earth. It doesn't really matter; they're stuck here now, just like you. They look utterly human externally, but they wear strange elastic jumpsuits, and arcane bits of machinery cover them occasionally. They look like extras from a 60s-70s scifi television show, and their tombs are built to match, all formica and plastic and curves.

Their bones are black carbon, scintillating with strange elements. Their blood is thick and greenish, more like sap than blood. It carries the vampiric germ; anyone who drinks it, or is fed it, or is injected with it in one of the ancient surgical machines will become a thrall-vampire in 1 week, unless their blood is cleansed before that. Vampires have blunt, human teeth. Biting does the same damage as a human does, unless they use tongue. Their tongues are coated in microscopic saw teeth that rip flesh with horrifying ease, and they use these terrible appendages like sponges to soak up blood. They are inhumanly strong, and magnificently hard to kill. Vampire wars were once fought with vibroblades and sonic canons that could disassemble you at a molecular level.

They once created a race of Renfields out of conquered people, enslaved on their millenia-long conquest of the universe. The DNA slurried and combined and restructured, extruded and recombined with more and more victims. Slowly creating the space ghouls that now wander these white, darkened corridors, maintaining the slow workings of their kidnapper-masters. Renfields are diminutive, like hunched men. Their translucent flesh displays their glasslike bones and pumping lymph. (The vampires removed the Renfields' need for blood so as to not eat their own slaves.) Renfields won't harm adventurers, prefering to lure them into traps or their sleeping masters.

***

Vibroblade
Extremely sharp. Does 1d8+1 damage. Has 50 charges in its tenebrovoltaic battery. Using one charge activates the vibration motor, causing an additional 1d8 of damage, sawing through limbs like butter and leaving heavily bleeding, ragged stumps.

Molecular Disassembly Canon
A mass of tubes and wires with a series of Nixie tube-like glass bells underneath, filled with Sonic Ooze. Must be fed blood weekly, or the ooze dies. Firing it causes an electric shock to agitate the oozes, which send out a metasonic vibration through the tubes. Does d12 damage, exploding on a 1 or 12.

***

Lunar Vampire
HD 3 ATK 12 DEF as leather MV 16’, 6’ fly once per day Tongue 2d6 Bite or Weapon 1d6/1d6 Save 8 Int 10, 15 if recently fed Morale 4
Emaciated, near-feral, and weak. Shadows of the dread cosmic vampires they once spawned from. Crave blood all the time, made mad by their hunger. Must be decapitated, have their hearts ripped out or staked, or be burned. Want to eat flesh and regain their opulence.
Vampiric: Regains 1d4 hp whenever it drinks blood.

Rose-Devil
HD 2 ATK 14 DEF as leather MV 18’ Thorns 1d6 Tendrils 1d6/1d6 Save 8 Int 16 Morale 3
Ancient vampires whose flesh has finally dissolved away from hunger. Bendy and thorned. Heads look like skulls made of wicker mixed with rose blossoms. They bathe in blood to grow back flesh. Can only be burned, or utterly dismembered. Want to become whole again.
Regeneration: When bled on, gain 1 hp.

Renfield
HD 1 ATK 10 DEF unarmored MV 12' Bite 1d4 Save 6 Int 8 Morale 6
Translucent, jellylike. Born from vats in the cellships, reconstituted collected biomass. They eat flesh too, but don't hunt; they'll eat whatever's left after their masters finish. Want to faithfully serve the vampires.
Translucent: Advantage on stealth rolls while in dim light or darkness.